Yes, exactly. Except it's not at all stupid. Which... come to think of it, I guess makes "Galactica" quite different from "The X-Files."
What I like in any of the series is that the episodes are self-contained and things are, usually, explained.
Please don't tune in to "Battlestar Galactica." You will be extremely disappointed. On "Galactica," there are some stories that were kicked off in the series pilot, way back in mid-2003, that were only just advanced in the first-season finale earlier this week. And I'm not talking about "the cylons are bad" or "there's a war." I'm talking about intimate character stories. Things were set in motion back in the pilot that only just this week came to fruition.
So don't watch the show, okay? It'll drive you crazy. And when you subsequently go bitch about it to your friends or whatever, you might have the effect of dissuading somebody who'll really love the show from tuning in.
No, Ron Moore wrote last week on his blog that there is absolutely no point behind 33 minutes. It's not part of the cylon plan, it's not a technobabble thing, it's got absolutely no back-story whatsoever. He just picked a random number out of his head.
No, that's not correct. I agree that something like that might make sense, but that's not how they do it.
First of all, a petty officer in the Navy is an E-4, E-5 or E-6, which is equivalent to a corporal, sergeant or staff sergeant in the Marines, or a specialist, sergeant or staff sergeant in the Army. The equivalent rank to a Marine private is a seaman recruit (E-1).
A CPO in the Navy is an E-7, making him equivalent to a sergeant first class in the Army or a gunnery sergeant in the Marines.
Adama's rank is equivalent to an O-6, making him a Navy captain or a Marine colonel. His XO, Col. Tigh, is an O-5, which would be a commander in the Navy or a Lt. Col. in the Marines. His given rank, colonel, is one grade too high to jibe with any existing set of ranks.
No, the correct conclusion is that Glen Larson just made some shit up when he wrote the original "Galactica" movie back in the 70s, and because the new writers wanted to stick with the same names for their characters, they were stuck with it. There's absolutely no sense in trying to reconcile it. It just is what it is.
I think the person to whom you replied spoke a little bit carelessly. He didn't really mean ambiguity as much as he meant complexity. Very little on "Galactica" is downright ambiguous. There are some mysteries, definitely, elements of the show that the writers deliberately refuse to tell us. And there are some aspects of the show that the writers just decline to delve into, like why the cylons attacked every 33 minutes or what Tom Zarek's back-story is. But there's very little actual ambiguity. Themes are clear as crystal. It's just that they're really complex.
Snaller was right. You're completely off in the weeds. While Browder and Black definitely had on-screen chemistry, they were not what you'd call strong actors. Subtlety and nuance were lost on them.
I just watched the finalle last night and my eyes still hurt from rolling!
Interesting. Do you show any other obvious signs of insanity?
If you put parts one and two of the season finale together, I'd put it up against any other two hours of episodic TV in the past four years. Seriously. You'd have to go back to "18th and Potomac"/"Two Cathedrals" to find anything even close.
One hot andriod is no enough for me to get interested in Battle Star!
How do you feel about spectacularly written stories with twists and turns in them that leave you sitting there on the couch in absolute shock for five solid minutes after the credits roll?
'Cause "Galactica's" got that too.
Thing about "Galactica," though, is that you have to come to it with an open mind. If you're one of those people who wants to see laser guns and walking toasters, don't even bother tuning in.
(Amusingly, Edward James Olmos [who just acts his ass off as Cmdr. Adama] was excoriated in the press in 2003 when he expressed basically that same sentiment in advance of the miniseries' premiere. He basically told fans of the old "Galactica" show not to watch, because they wouldn't find what they were looking for. That was funny enough, but the best part was the next week, when Sci Fi gave Ron Moore an opportunity to backpedal from Olmos' comment in an interview, and he essentially said, "No, Eddie's right. Don't watch this show if you're expecting hard-fightin', hard-lovin', rootin'-tootin' action. It's not that kind of show." Sci Fi's management was stunned. I thought it was hilarious.)
They've been using the shit out of that technique on the show. The film-school-poseur name for it is in media res, which basically means "we now join our show already in progress." It's a really powerful technique if employed deftly.
I love the fact that Sci Fi in the US decided to air "33" and "Water" back-to-back. If you watch them a week apart, it's easy to miss what I think is one of the most clever storytelling devices I've seen in a long, long time. At the end of "33," Boomer on Caprica is soaking wet from the rain, huddled with Helo beneath a tree. In the opening scene of "Water," Boomer on Galactica is soaking wet, sitting in the locker room. It really does a lot to connect the two Boomers together in the viewers' minds, but it lost a lot of its impact in the UK airing because of all the time that transpired between the first and second episodes. I think it's great that Sci Fi decided to air them together.
If you exclude the introductory and wrap-up episodes common in more recent series, you could swap the first and last episode of ST:TNG.
Well, that's true in one sense, but in another sense it's not true at all. The technobabble and the bumpy-headed aliens and the blinky lights all stayed constant during the run of that show, yes, but the characters evolved visibly. Picard grew from being a gruff, distant captain to being a father-figure for the crew and emotional touchstone for the show. Geordi went from being a giddy cadet to a resourceful, competent engineer. Et cetera, et cetera.
Now, a lot of that character development was organic. As the show went on, the producers eventually learned that some types of stories worked better than others, so they became more refined. Would the show have been better if that character development had been planned from the start? I dunno. Maybe.
"Stargate" is kind of the opposite. The plot thickens, new secondary characters come and go, the settings change and evolve, and a big back-story develops as the characters explore the universe...but the characters themselves don't really change at all. They tried giving one of the characters an arc --Jackson --but the outcry from the fan base was so loud that they hit a giant "reset" button and put him right back where he had been two seasons before.
Take the character of Sam Carter for example. (Set aside the fact that she's a stone-cold geek hottie. This is very important, but I'm not gonna talk about it right this minute.) In eight years (nine? whatever) she's gone from being a captain in the Air Force to a major to a lieutenant colonel. Now, ignore for a minute the fact that that's completely unreasonable. Has her character grown? Has she become a leader? Not really, no. She's still just another member of the team, the Spock to O'Neill's Kirk and Jackson's McCoy. When they promoted O'Neill to accommodate Richard Dean Anderson's desire for less screen time, it left a vacuum in the structure of the show. Has that vacuum been filled? Not really. It would have made sense for Carter to step up and fill it, but instead the writers just chose to write stories that didn't involve SG-1 as a team any more.
I like "Stargate." I find it entertaining. I have a season pass for it on my TiVo. But great TV, it ain't.
The stick-up-the-butt film-school explanation for it is that it helps the audience forget that they're watching a movie. Whenever you do something like use a Steadicam or a crane shot or slow-motion, you remind the audience that they're watching a movie, and the level of emotional engagement goes down. The theory is that by getting rid of a lot of that stuff --using handheld cameras and natural light, using body mics instead of looping dialogue in post --you help the audience forget they're watching a movie, which helps them become more emotionally invested in the story and the characters. It's like MSG for film. It makes good movies seem even better.
That's the rationale behind it. Does it work? Opinions are like assholes; everybody's got one. Me, I think it works. So do the Dogme 95 people. Others may differ.
Well, sort of. "Star Trek" was pretty superficial for the most part. There were exceptions, yes, but in general they dealt with Big Issues in a very shallow way. Take the episode where they tried to decide whether Data had civil rights. It was a very one-sided hour of TV. Well written, nicely acted, and extremely entertaining, but it was very one-sided. The question was, "Does Data have rights?" and the answer was, "Yes," and then they spent the final three acts proving it. "Galactica," by contrast, tends to keep the Big Issues fuzzy. There are no answers, no resolutions.
Funny you should mention "The Next Generation," though. In my opinion, some of the best episodes of that series are "Darmok," "The Inner Light," "The Perfect Mate" and my personal favorite of all, "Family." Other episodes like "The Best of Both Worlds" and "Yesterday's Enterprise" and "All Good Things" were very good, but in my opinion they're not really on the same level as the four I named.
What those four episodes I named all have in common is that they've got nothing to do with spaceships or phasers or Romulans. They're about characters. "Darmok" is the story of two characters who don't speak the same language. "The Inner Light" is about a man who loses his memory. "The Perfect Mate" is about impossible love, and "Family" is about how a man recovers from an unimaginably traumatic experience. Any one of those would have made a great drama without any science-fiction aspect to it at all.
I think that's the kind of writing that we see on "Galactica" every week. It's complex and nuanced and, in a way, hair-tearingly frustrating, because there are no answers. Take last week's (US-aired) episode for instance. Is Tom Zarek a terrorist or a prisoner of conscience? We don't know, because the writers don't tell us. We're not allowed to know, because which one he is isn't important. What's important is how people react to the situation he creates. Or last week's "33." Why 33 minutes? We never find out, not ever, not even by the end of the first season. I can see where some people would be annoyed by that kind of laser-beam focus on what's important to the story. Personally, I really like it.
Have you seen episode 12, "Kobol's Last Gleaming Part One" yet? I'm no expert, but I have a couple of friends who are. They edit movies for a living. They assure me that, from an editorial point of view, they'd put the first five minutes of "Kobol's Last Gleaming" up against any five minutes from any movie ever.
I thought it was great when I saw it, but after I talked to these two friends about it and they pointed out all kinds of little things to me, I realized just what a job had gone into creating those five short minutes of TV.
Yeah, you're right. They're treating it like a movie. A really, really good movie.
Funny story. The series pilot (a 3-hour movie that was run in December 2003 as a miniseries, and later edited down and run on NBC as a movie-of-the-week) is out on DVD now, and it comes with a commentary track. The writer, Ron Moore, is on the track, and he talks about the one part of the pilot that he really, really regrets.
I don't know if you've seen it, but at one point Capt. Lee "Apollo" Adama uses a set of electric pulse generators to send out a big burst of radiation in order to cover the refugees' escape from a cylon attack. In the commentary, Moore says that he hated putting that kind of technobabble bullshit into his script, but he'd written himself into a corner and that the jargon was the only practical way out of it.
But he did poke some fun at himself along the way. After Apollo gave his wordy, jargony, meaningless speech to one of the other characters, her slightly glazed-over reply was, "The lesson here is not to ask follow-up questions."
I thought it was a good line at the time. Now that I know the story behind it, I think it's brilliant.
Can't they get the terms right. It should be Battle Stations or Red Alert--not Action Alert.
Actually, they say "action stations," not "action alert." "Action stations" is correct military jargon...for the Royal Navy. They also say "set condition one," which is correct jargon for the US Navy.
The milieu of the new "Galactica" is a blend of US Navy, Royal Navy, US Marines and a few of the less silly aspects of the old, 1970s show. For instance, during the series pilot if you listen carefully you can hear a voice on the 1MC say, "Do not radiate or rotate antennas while personnel are aloft," which is exactly what you'd hear aboard a ship in the US Navy. I mean, word for word. On the other hand, the order of battle for the officers goes lieutenant, captain, colonel, commander, which is not similar to any existing military force structure. It's a direct lift from the old show's character names: Commander Adama, Colonel Tigh, Captain Apollo, Lieutenant Starbuck.
There's no great technical advances in the show as far as the character's technology.
Correct. This is by conscious design. The show was written from the start to be a very low-tech science-fiction show. The in-band story behind that is that cylons were able to infiltrate and corrupt any computer system they encountered, so the Colonials got rid of almost all of their automation. After decades of peace, the Colonials reinstated their automation, and it was because of this automation that the cylons were able to so overwhelmingly defeat the Colonials with their surprise attack.
BG has no such exscuse besides the laziness of the wanna-be writer.
It's not laziness. It's much, much harder to write a sensible, internally consistent story from realistic premises than it is to just make up technobabble every week. When he sat down to write "Galactica," Moore asked, "What if this happened to us?" In doing so, he set a nearly impossible task for himself: to tell a story set in a distant solar system about spaceships and robots in a way that would be not merely alien-of-the-week science fiction but character-driven high drama.
Now, you may not like that sort of thing. But it seems like, from looking at things like TV ratings over the past few years, that most people do. Shows like "The West Wing," "NYPD Blue" and "Lost" have been both critically lauded and phenomenally successful. "Galactica" is in the same class.
If you're looking for space aliens and shoot-em-ups and jargon and gadgets, "Galactica" probably isn't the show for you. Doesn't mean it's bad; quite the contrary. In my opinion, with the lackluster performance of "The West Wing" this year and the fact that "Lost" isn't paying off quite like I think it should, I think "Battlestar Galactica" is the best scripted drama show on US television right now. Not just among genre shows, but among all shows.
But if you don't like those kinds of shows, then you're not gonna be happy with "Galactica." That's not because it's trying to be genre science fiction and failing. It's because it's trying to be character drama that happens to be set in outer space... and it's succeeding.
Somewhere I read that the premise behind "Star Trek" was, "Let's see what's out there," while the premise behind the new "Galactica" is, "Run like hell, they're after us."
The premise of the old "Galactica," of course, was, "Run like hell, they're --ooh, a casino planet!" First recorded instance of a TV show with ADD.
Incremental compilation dates back to the early 60s with LISP.
I'm pretty sure we're not talking about incremental compilation. I'm pretty sure that Zipwow was speaking carelessly and that we're talking about predictive compilation. That's what I'm assuming, anyway, based on context. The difference being that Xcode compiles your project in the background as you make changes at the file level. Incremental compilation is different. It breaks your program up at the function level (not the file level) and compiles it in pieces, which means when you tell the compiler to build your project, it only needs to compile out-of-date functions rather than files. Different.
But I could be totally wrong about that. Maybe Zipwow was really talking about incremental compilation, in which case my question was pretty out-of-left-field.
The first thing you'll notice is the incremental compilation.
Sounds an awful lot like Xcode. Wonder who had it first? I think the first version of Xcode with predictive compilation was released in the summer of 2003.
Why would you have to go to a post house to do this?
Because we don't even have a DVD player in the office, much less the capacity to dub to QuickTime. It's a matter of logistics, not law.
The anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA prevent legal fair use quoting of media.
No, they don't. Maybe it might be possible for you to concoct some bizarre, convoluted scenario in which copy prevention might make it inconvenient to make fair use, but that's hardly an argument. I get the feeling that you're trying to back-door into "we should abolish all copy prevention," which is clearly absurd. We already have an epidemic of piracy in this country. If anything, we need more, stronger copy prevention, not less.
You want to find a bad guy, you want to find an enemy of fair use? Look no further than people who would use fair use as a wedge to enable piracy.
You, however, seem to be incapable of of learning anything from my posts.
That's because every single thing you've said has been just flat-out wrong.
Your claim that we all have full access and legal permission to use our fair use rights is undermined by the provisions of the DMCA which make circumvention illegal.
Right there is a perfect example of what I mean by "flat-out wrong."
I'm stunned by how many people responded to my comment by saying, as loudly as they could, "NUH-UH!"
The right to life isn't mentioned in the Bill of Rights either, but I'm pretty sure we have one. Nor is there ever any mention of a right to privacy, a right to free movement or a right to own sexy purple underwear. There's not even anything in there about a right to vote or to own property or to have children.
What is in the Bill of Rights is a paragraph that talks about how the fact that some rights were chosen to be specifically enumerated should not be interpreted as meaning that no other rights exist.
if you as an ordinary individual go to your local video store, pick up a movie, rip it, and paste movie snippets of it online with a review that you will get a DMCA takedown notice.
Simply untrue. When we first got up and running in the winter of 2003, before we'd established contacts at the various studio publicity departments, that's exactly how we ran movie reviews. We sent our feature reporter down to the Blockbuster to rent a DVD, and he wrote his review for the print edition. For supplemental material on our Web site, we took the DVD to a post house (one co-owned by one of the members of our parent company's board of directors, fortunately) and had them dub a clip of the movie to a QuickTime for us.
We did that for... hell, probably a full six months before we started receiving screener copies. Not only did we not receive the ever-so-melodramatically named "takedown notice," but more than one studio PR flack told us that she loved the way we included clips from the movie on the Web site. (Why all studio PR flacks are women with really sexy telephone voices is a subject for a different conversation.)
So all your stuff about "they'll take you down" and "people can't do it" is, to put a point on it, bullshit. You're just running around yelling "the sky is falling," and in the process doing a pretty serious disservice. You're confusing and scaring people with your misinformation, and my personal opinion is that it would be great if you'd cut it out.
If that was true, then it would be legal to sell DRM breaking tools like the Adobe e-book DRM remover that the Fed busted Dmitry Sklyarov for.
You colossal, mind-shattering dumbass. A court acquitted Elcomsoft of all charges more than two years agospecifically on the grounds that their tool was legal because its primary purpose was to enable fair use, not to break the law.
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My God, BSG is the new X-Files!
... come to think of it, I guess makes "Galactica" quite different from "The X-Files."
Yes, exactly. Except it's not at all stupid. Which
What I like in any of the series is that the episodes are self-contained and things are, usually, explained.
Please don't tune in to "Battlestar Galactica." You will be extremely disappointed. On "Galactica," there are some stories that were kicked off in the series pilot, way back in mid-2003, that were only just advanced in the first-season finale earlier this week. And I'm not talking about "the cylons are bad" or "there's a war." I'm talking about intimate character stories. Things were set in motion back in the pilot that only just this week came to fruition.
So don't watch the show, okay? It'll drive you crazy. And when you subsequently go bitch about it to your friends or whatever, you might have the effect of dissuading somebody who'll really love the show from tuning in.
No, Ron Moore wrote last week on his blog that there is absolutely no point behind 33 minutes. It's not part of the cylon plan, it's not a technobabble thing, it's got absolutely no back-story whatsoever. He just picked a random number out of his head.
"Dogme" 95 (heh) ... The whole point of dogma 95
The term is actually Dogme 95, not Dogma 95. It's the Danish word for "dogma."
No, that's not correct. I agree that something like that might make sense, but that's not how they do it.
First of all, a petty officer in the Navy is an E-4, E-5 or E-6, which is equivalent to a corporal, sergeant or staff sergeant in the Marines, or a specialist, sergeant or staff sergeant in the Army. The equivalent rank to a Marine private is a seaman recruit (E-1).
A CPO in the Navy is an E-7, making him equivalent to a sergeant first class in the Army or a gunnery sergeant in the Marines.
Adama's rank is equivalent to an O-6, making him a Navy captain or a Marine colonel. His XO, Col. Tigh, is an O-5, which would be a commander in the Navy or a Lt. Col. in the Marines. His given rank, colonel, is one grade too high to jibe with any existing set of ranks.
No, the correct conclusion is that Glen Larson just made some shit up when he wrote the original "Galactica" movie back in the 70s, and because the new writers wanted to stick with the same names for their characters, they were stuck with it. There's absolutely no sense in trying to reconcile it. It just is what it is.
I think the person to whom you replied spoke a little bit carelessly. He didn't really mean ambiguity as much as he meant complexity. Very little on "Galactica" is downright ambiguous. There are some mysteries, definitely, elements of the show that the writers deliberately refuse to tell us. And there are some aspects of the show that the writers just decline to delve into, like why the cylons attacked every 33 minutes or what Tom Zarek's back-story is. But there's very little actual ambiguity. Themes are clear as crystal. It's just that they're really complex.
Then don't watch it. Tune in to "According to Jim" or "She Spies" or whatever piece of mind candy floats your boat.
Snaller was right. You're completely off in the weeds. While Browder and Black definitely had on-screen chemistry, they were not what you'd call strong actors. Subtlety and nuance were lost on them.
I just watched the finalle last night and my eyes still hurt from rolling!
Interesting. Do you show any other obvious signs of insanity?
If you put parts one and two of the season finale together, I'd put it up against any other two hours of episodic TV in the past four years. Seriously. You'd have to go back to "18th and Potomac"/"Two Cathedrals" to find anything even close.
One hot andriod is no enough for me to get interested in Battle Star!
How do you feel about spectacularly written stories with twists and turns in them that leave you sitting there on the couch in absolute shock for five solid minutes after the credits roll?
'Cause "Galactica's" got that too.
Thing about "Galactica," though, is that you have to come to it with an open mind. If you're one of those people who wants to see laser guns and walking toasters, don't even bother tuning in.
(Amusingly, Edward James Olmos [who just acts his ass off as Cmdr. Adama] was excoriated in the press in 2003 when he expressed basically that same sentiment in advance of the miniseries' premiere. He basically told fans of the old "Galactica" show not to watch, because they wouldn't find what they were looking for. That was funny enough, but the best part was the next week, when Sci Fi gave Ron Moore an opportunity to backpedal from Olmos' comment in an interview, and he essentially said, "No, Eddie's right. Don't watch this show if you're expecting hard-fightin', hard-lovin', rootin'-tootin' action. It's not that kind of show." Sci Fi's management was stunned. I thought it was hilarious.)
They've been using the shit out of that technique on the show. The film-school-poseur name for it is in media res, which basically means "we now join our show already in progress." It's a really powerful technique if employed deftly.
I love the fact that Sci Fi in the US decided to air "33" and "Water" back-to-back. If you watch them a week apart, it's easy to miss what I think is one of the most clever storytelling devices I've seen in a long, long time. At the end of "33," Boomer on Caprica is soaking wet from the rain, huddled with Helo beneath a tree. In the opening scene of "Water," Boomer on Galactica is soaking wet, sitting in the locker room. It really does a lot to connect the two Boomers together in the viewers' minds, but it lost a lot of its impact in the UK airing because of all the time that transpired between the first and second episodes. I think it's great that Sci Fi decided to air them together.
I used to hack it with scripts and makefiles--they'd basically watch for file writes.
How did you get around the linking problem?
If you exclude the introductory and wrap-up episodes common in more recent series, you could swap the first and last episode of ST:TNG.
...but the characters themselves don't really change at all. They tried giving one of the characters an arc --Jackson --but the outcry from the fan base was so loud that they hit a giant "reset" button and put him right back where he had been two seasons before.
Well, that's true in one sense, but in another sense it's not true at all. The technobabble and the bumpy-headed aliens and the blinky lights all stayed constant during the run of that show, yes, but the characters evolved visibly. Picard grew from being a gruff, distant captain to being a father-figure for the crew and emotional touchstone for the show. Geordi went from being a giddy cadet to a resourceful, competent engineer. Et cetera, et cetera.
Now, a lot of that character development was organic. As the show went on, the producers eventually learned that some types of stories worked better than others, so they became more refined. Would the show have been better if that character development had been planned from the start? I dunno. Maybe.
"Stargate" is kind of the opposite. The plot thickens, new secondary characters come and go, the settings change and evolve, and a big back-story develops as the characters explore the universe
Take the character of Sam Carter for example. (Set aside the fact that she's a stone-cold geek hottie. This is very important, but I'm not gonna talk about it right this minute.) In eight years (nine? whatever) she's gone from being a captain in the Air Force to a major to a lieutenant colonel. Now, ignore for a minute the fact that that's completely unreasonable. Has her character grown? Has she become a leader? Not really, no. She's still just another member of the team, the Spock to O'Neill's Kirk and Jackson's McCoy. When they promoted O'Neill to accommodate Richard Dean Anderson's desire for less screen time, it left a vacuum in the structure of the show. Has that vacuum been filled? Not really. It would have made sense for Carter to step up and fill it, but instead the writers just chose to write stories that didn't involve SG-1 as a team any more.
I like "Stargate." I find it entertaining. I have a season pass for it on my TiVo. But great TV, it ain't.
The stick-up-the-butt film-school explanation for it is that it helps the audience forget that they're watching a movie. Whenever you do something like use a Steadicam or a crane shot or slow-motion, you remind the audience that they're watching a movie, and the level of emotional engagement goes down. The theory is that by getting rid of a lot of that stuff --using handheld cameras and natural light, using body mics instead of looping dialogue in post --you help the audience forget they're watching a movie, which helps them become more emotionally invested in the story and the characters. It's like MSG for film. It makes good movies seem even better.
That's the rationale behind it. Does it work? Opinions are like assholes; everybody's got one. Me, I think it works. So do the Dogme 95 people. Others may differ.
Well, sort of. "Star Trek" was pretty superficial for the most part. There were exceptions, yes, but in general they dealt with Big Issues in a very shallow way. Take the episode where they tried to decide whether Data had civil rights. It was a very one-sided hour of TV. Well written, nicely acted, and extremely entertaining, but it was very one-sided. The question was, "Does Data have rights?" and the answer was, "Yes," and then they spent the final three acts proving it. "Galactica," by contrast, tends to keep the Big Issues fuzzy. There are no answers, no resolutions.
Funny you should mention "The Next Generation," though. In my opinion, some of the best episodes of that series are "Darmok," "The Inner Light," "The Perfect Mate" and my personal favorite of all, "Family." Other episodes like "The Best of Both Worlds" and "Yesterday's Enterprise" and "All Good Things" were very good, but in my opinion they're not really on the same level as the four I named.
What those four episodes I named all have in common is that they've got nothing to do with spaceships or phasers or Romulans. They're about characters. "Darmok" is the story of two characters who don't speak the same language. "The Inner Light" is about a man who loses his memory. "The Perfect Mate" is about impossible love, and "Family" is about how a man recovers from an unimaginably traumatic experience. Any one of those would have made a great drama without any science-fiction aspect to it at all.
I think that's the kind of writing that we see on "Galactica" every week. It's complex and nuanced and, in a way, hair-tearingly frustrating, because there are no answers. Take last week's (US-aired) episode for instance. Is Tom Zarek a terrorist or a prisoner of conscience? We don't know, because the writers don't tell us. We're not allowed to know, because which one he is isn't important. What's important is how people react to the situation he creates. Or last week's "33." Why 33 minutes? We never find out, not ever, not even by the end of the first season. I can see where some people would be annoyed by that kind of laser-beam focus on what's important to the story. Personally, I really like it.
Have you seen episode 12, "Kobol's Last Gleaming Part One" yet? I'm no expert, but I have a couple of friends who are. They edit movies for a living. They assure me that, from an editorial point of view, they'd put the first five minutes of "Kobol's Last Gleaming" up against any five minutes from any movie ever.
I thought it was great when I saw it, but after I talked to these two friends about it and they pointed out all kinds of little things to me, I realized just what a job had gone into creating those five short minutes of TV.
Yeah, you're right. They're treating it like a movie. A really, really good movie.
Funny story. The series pilot (a 3-hour movie that was run in December 2003 as a miniseries, and later edited down and run on NBC as a movie-of-the-week) is out on DVD now, and it comes with a commentary track. The writer, Ron Moore, is on the track, and he talks about the one part of the pilot that he really, really regrets.
I don't know if you've seen it, but at one point Capt. Lee "Apollo" Adama uses a set of electric pulse generators to send out a big burst of radiation in order to cover the refugees' escape from a cylon attack. In the commentary, Moore says that he hated putting that kind of technobabble bullshit into his script, but he'd written himself into a corner and that the jargon was the only practical way out of it.
But he did poke some fun at himself along the way. After Apollo gave his wordy, jargony, meaningless speech to one of the other characters, her slightly glazed-over reply was, "The lesson here is not to ask follow-up questions."
I thought it was a good line at the time. Now that I know the story behind it, I think it's brilliant.
Can't they get the terms right. It should be Battle Stations or Red Alert--not Action Alert.
...for the Royal Navy. They also say "set condition one," which is correct jargon for the US Navy.
... and it's succeeding.
Actually, they say "action stations," not "action alert." "Action stations" is correct military jargon
The milieu of the new "Galactica" is a blend of US Navy, Royal Navy, US Marines and a few of the less silly aspects of the old, 1970s show. For instance, during the series pilot if you listen carefully you can hear a voice on the 1MC say, "Do not radiate or rotate antennas while personnel are aloft," which is exactly what you'd hear aboard a ship in the US Navy. I mean, word for word. On the other hand, the order of battle for the officers goes lieutenant, captain, colonel, commander, which is not similar to any existing military force structure. It's a direct lift from the old show's character names: Commander Adama, Colonel Tigh, Captain Apollo, Lieutenant Starbuck.
There's no great technical advances in the show as far as the character's technology.
Correct. This is by conscious design. The show was written from the start to be a very low-tech science-fiction show. The in-band story behind that is that cylons were able to infiltrate and corrupt any computer system they encountered, so the Colonials got rid of almost all of their automation. After decades of peace, the Colonials reinstated their automation, and it was because of this automation that the cylons were able to so overwhelmingly defeat the Colonials with their surprise attack.
BG has no such exscuse besides the laziness of the wanna-be writer.
It's not laziness. It's much, much harder to write a sensible, internally consistent story from realistic premises than it is to just make up technobabble every week. When he sat down to write "Galactica," Moore asked, "What if this happened to us?" In doing so, he set a nearly impossible task for himself: to tell a story set in a distant solar system about spaceships and robots in a way that would be not merely alien-of-the-week science fiction but character-driven high drama.
Now, you may not like that sort of thing. But it seems like, from looking at things like TV ratings over the past few years, that most people do. Shows like "The West Wing," "NYPD Blue" and "Lost" have been both critically lauded and phenomenally successful. "Galactica" is in the same class.
If you're looking for space aliens and shoot-em-ups and jargon and gadgets, "Galactica" probably isn't the show for you. Doesn't mean it's bad; quite the contrary. In my opinion, with the lackluster performance of "The West Wing" this year and the fact that "Lost" isn't paying off quite like I think it should, I think "Battlestar Galactica" is the best scripted drama show on US television right now. Not just among genre shows, but among all shows.
But if you don't like those kinds of shows, then you're not gonna be happy with "Galactica." That's not because it's trying to be genre science fiction and failing. It's because it's trying to be character drama that happens to be set in outer space
Somewhere I read that the premise behind "Star Trek" was, "Let's see what's out there," while the premise behind the new "Galactica" is, "Run like hell, they're after us."
The premise of the old "Galactica," of course, was, "Run like hell, they're --ooh, a casino planet!" First recorded instance of a TV show with ADD.
Incremental compilation dates back to the early 60s with LISP.
I'm pretty sure we're not talking about incremental compilation. I'm pretty sure that Zipwow was speaking carelessly and that we're talking about predictive compilation. That's what I'm assuming, anyway, based on context. The difference being that Xcode compiles your project in the background as you make changes at the file level. Incremental compilation is different. It breaks your program up at the function level (not the file level) and compiles it in pieces, which means when you tell the compiler to build your project, it only needs to compile out-of-date functions rather than files. Different.
But I could be totally wrong about that. Maybe Zipwow was really talking about incremental compilation, in which case my question was pretty out-of-left-field.
The first thing you'll notice is the incremental compilation.
Sounds an awful lot like Xcode. Wonder who had it first? I think the first version of Xcode with predictive compilation was released in the summer of 2003.
You don't have to ctrl-z
Undo?
Why would you have to go to a post house to do this?
Because we don't even have a DVD player in the office, much less the capacity to dub to QuickTime. It's a matter of logistics, not law.
The anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA prevent legal fair use quoting of media.
No, they don't. Maybe it might be possible for you to concoct some bizarre, convoluted scenario in which copy prevention might make it inconvenient to make fair use, but that's hardly an argument. I get the feeling that you're trying to back-door into "we should abolish all copy prevention," which is clearly absurd. We already have an epidemic of piracy in this country. If anything, we need more, stronger copy prevention, not less.
You want to find a bad guy, you want to find an enemy of fair use? Look no further than people who would use fair use as a wedge to enable piracy.
You, however, seem to be incapable of of learning anything from my posts.
That's because every single thing you've said has been just flat-out wrong.
Your claim that we all have full access and legal permission to use our fair use rights is undermined by the provisions of the DMCA which make circumvention illegal.
Right there is a perfect example of what I mean by "flat-out wrong."
I'm stunned by how many people responded to my comment by saying, as loudly as they could, "NUH-UH!"
The right to life isn't mentioned in the Bill of Rights either, but I'm pretty sure we have one. Nor is there ever any mention of a right to privacy, a right to free movement or a right to own sexy purple underwear. There's not even anything in there about a right to vote or to own property or to have children.
What is in the Bill of Rights is a paragraph that talks about how the fact that some rights were chosen to be specifically enumerated should not be interpreted as meaning that no other rights exist.
Hint: They're talking to you.
if you as an ordinary individual go to your local video store, pick up a movie, rip it, and paste movie snippets of it online with a review that you will get a DMCA takedown notice.
... hell, probably a full six months before we started receiving screener copies. Not only did we not receive the ever-so-melodramatically named "takedown notice," but more than one studio PR flack told us that she loved the way we included clips from the movie on the Web site. (Why all studio PR flacks are women with really sexy telephone voices is a subject for a different conversation.)
Simply untrue. When we first got up and running in the winter of 2003, before we'd established contacts at the various studio publicity departments, that's exactly how we ran movie reviews. We sent our feature reporter down to the Blockbuster to rent a DVD, and he wrote his review for the print edition. For supplemental material on our Web site, we took the DVD to a post house (one co-owned by one of the members of our parent company's board of directors, fortunately) and had them dub a clip of the movie to a QuickTime for us.
We did that for
So all your stuff about "they'll take you down" and "people can't do it" is, to put a point on it, bullshit. You're just running around yelling "the sky is falling," and in the process doing a pretty serious disservice. You're confusing and scaring people with your misinformation, and my personal opinion is that it would be great if you'd cut it out.
I sort of covered that when I mentioned ToySight. The software to read gestures from the iSight already exists. It's being used for a game.
If that was true, then it would be legal to sell DRM breaking tools like the Adobe e-book DRM remover that the Fed busted Dmitry Sklyarov for.
You colossal, mind-shattering dumbass. A court acquitted Elcomsoft of all charges more than two years ago specifically on the grounds that their tool was legal because its primary purpose was to enable fair use, not to break the law.