Jlawrence’s Comments (group member since Mar 08, 2010)

Jlawrence’s comments from the The Sword and Laser group.

Gah, I'm another who's shelled out for the original trilogy in multiple formats repeatedly. I'm still debating on the blu rays...

Philip wrote: "Have the 'dual-edition' DVD's been discontinued?...apparently the transfer is a half-arsed desultory mess. Non-anamorphic and smearing all over the place. Like a teenager being forced to do something that they don't want to, ineffectually flapping their arms going "but I caaaan't."

http://savestarwars.com/gout.html (disclaimer - I haven't read all of this, just scanned and looked at the pictures.) Sodon - is it really this bad? or are they being a little precious?"

I bought the 'dual-edition' DVD versions too - the bonus discs with the unaltered originals are pretty half-assed transfers indeed. The non-anamorphic nature looks ridiculous on any widescreen TV, the colors look washed-out, image is somewhat blurry throughout, the frame jiggles sometimes. Despite all that, on a non-widescreen TV I was able to watch them and get a bit of that good ol' 'holy crap! I'm watching Star Wars!' feeling back. On the widescreen I have now, however, the 'rectangle surrounded by black' aspect makes it pretty unpleasant.

I've seen part of the blu-ray of New Hope, and it does look fantastic, enough so that I started thinking, 'Maybe I can forgive the special editions after all...'. But then it got to all the annoying extra CGI creatures during the drive through Mos Eisley (which, BTW, look even more glaringly different from the texture of the rest of film thanks to HD resolution), and began feeling irked, then got to Greedo shooting first, and felt pissed off again and didn't watch the rest.

I'll rent the blu-ray of Empire (the SE changes to which don't bother me) and see if that sways me into purchasing these films yet again. If high-quality non-SE versions were on the blu-rays, there'd be no decision to make.

(Annnnnnnnnnd....there's also the realm of fan edits - maybe someone there will take it upon themselves to construct a HD true restored OT...)

Philip wrote: "but it was enlightening to see what a shambles the production of Star Wars actually was."

The Making of Star Wars: The Definitive Story Behind the Original Film is another great, strangely inspiring and super-detailed look at the chaos surrounding the film's making.

Al, there's now $12 seats available (does not include a book).

Yes - www.audiblepodcast.com/sword

Jenny wrote: Is the Swedish Hall thing tied to S&L?

The Sept. 21 Stephenson reading at the SF Swedish Hall is doubling as another S&L get-together.

There's apparently $12 seats still available (you don't get a copy of the book, which is why they're so much cheaper than the regular tickets), but we'll also go someplace to eat or drink afterward so people can meet even if they don't want to go to the reading.

Yeah, I agree with the scheme of Reamde as primary choice, Ready Player One as alt, and a TW-leaning Sword choice for next book (just now I have to finish the unofficial alternate Stand on Zanzibar ;)).

I'm torn. My laziness votes for Reamde since I love it when the club aligns with something I'll be reading anyway, and, beyond laziness, I'm sure the book would encourage interesting discussion.

But my bookclubs-should-encourage-variety sense votes with Sean. I'll go with whatever the majority (er, I mean Autarch Veronica) decides.

If we don't do Reamde, it'd make sense for us to read Tad Williams, given the non-secret secret thing...

Is that like no-tea?

Hmm, it would really depend on what was available in the "library", but I'm already a prime member and would consider it.

Kindle tells me I'm 26% of the way in.

Even if some of his central predictions are off, what's impressing me is how thoroughly (and caustically) Brunner has built this vision of the future around his main premises. That is, even though I'm aware that overpopulation in industrialized countries is unlikely to occur quite as envisioned in the book, I'm sucked in by the detail Brunner has worked into everything (the commercials, the clothes, the various social mores, the lingo, etc.) and the kind of panoramic way he's presenting it. And it's just well-written to boot. I'll have to see if that sustains me through the whole thing, of course, but so far it's pretty intriguing.

One complaint: "Chad C. Mulligan" seems a little too obviously the mouthpiece for Brunner's own theories - anyone else feel that way?

Jason wrote: "@Jlawrence: Oooh, I love IF. Good that you mentioned that.

Quick aside: I have two games in the IF Archive. One was an April Fool's gag I did ages ago that "ported" the original Quake to the Inform language. The other was my entrant in the 2006 IF Comp (11th place!) called "Game Producer!" and is basically an IF of my job."

Cool! I'll have to look at those. I made one IF game long ago (using ADRIFT), "The Screen Savers on Planet X", which actually features Mr. Tom Merritt as a character (it was made for a show we both worked for at TechTV.)

Jason wrote: "Trinity is a great example, but my favorite Infocom game of all time will always be A Mind Forever Voyaging. It's an exceptionally clever game, where your body stays in one place, but you progress by controlling robots remotely."

Ah, I think you mean Suspended! That's a favorite of mine, too - I love how each robot perceives and describes things completely differently and you have to piece together their differing views to figure out what's going on. Probably the best exploitation of IF's pure text medium I've played. A Mind Forever Voyaging was fantastic too - the way it built up emotional resonance, not through a typical narrative, but by having you explore and then re-explore locations and see how time has changed them.

This is a topic I've been fascinated in for a long time. I agree melding narrative and gameplay is a huge design challenge.

Jason, I agree about Planescape: Torment -- it's undoubtedly the richest story (and one of the most unique worlds) I've ever encountered in a game, and its characters and situations stayed with me for a long time. And it didn't have to rely on linear rail-roading to provide that richness, it had significant story branches. I plan to re-play it next year.

Also high on a my great-narratives-in-games list, though much more linear than Planescape, is The Longest Journey. Sometimes its puzzles had that typical adventure-game-arbitrary feel to it, but its characters (esp. excellent voice acting), storyline, charm and settings won out.

I've wanted to try out Bastion for its dynamic narration, as xenphi mentioned. I think having a game where you truly "create your own story", like the original Sid Meier's Pirates! (wanted to play it forever), is a different design challenge than the one where you're trying to wed an intended narrative (with branches or not) with some player agency.

The hobbyist interactive fiction community (which has some commercial offshoots these days) has done some interesting experiments with narrative in games. "Interactive fiction" is a descendant of the text adventures of the '70s and '80s, where you command an alter-ego in a textually described environment with commands like GET THE LAMP, GO NORTH, ASK GEROLD ABOUT THE MURDER, etc. The Infocom game Trinity from that era is another of the best examples I've experienced of a structured narrative melded with gameplay.

The command prompt UI of these games is both a blessing and a curse - it allows an great range of possible player action, much more than a choose-your-own-adventure for instance, but it always promises more freedom of action than any game can currently provide (ie, there will always be sensible actions that are simply not implemented in a game). Nonetheless, there's lots of interesting efforts in IF. A great intro to the medium is Emily Short's Bronze (a retelling of Beauty and the Beast) which you can play online -- answer "no" to the first prompt to get tutorial hints, and the compass at the top right shows directions you can currently move in.

Who knew that hadrons were excellent stimulants for feline growth spurts?

You know, it's funny, the same question was posed for an earlier book the group read, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom -- (view spoiler)[ in that book pretty much everyone can opt for the same thing Lloyd is presented with. (hide spoiler)].

My answer then was no, but this time I'm leaning towards yes - I think in both cases I was blatantly influenced by each book's vision of the future. (view spoiler)[Down & Out posits humans using immortality to play endless meme-sideshow-popularity contests, whereas the vision Lloyd has of far-flung future events in Flashforward was a great 'sense of wonder' moment and one of my favorite parts of the book. So I guess my answers depends on who's painting the picture of the future. ;) (hide spoiler)]

Sean wrote: "I don't see how that makes it not-a-choice. My mind is looking at the options and determining which is best. Sure, given the exact same set of circumstances it would reach the same conclusion, but that doesn't change the process taking place in my brain."

Well, I'd say 'having free will' is usually understood as being able to choose any of a set of options in a given situation, not being pre-destined to always make the same choice in that given situation. Perhaps 'inevitable choice' would be better phrasing than 'not-a-choice.'

Sean wrote: "If anything, a non deterministic universe is the one where we're deprived of choice, since it would only be possible if our minds were subject to the whims of random quantum events. Instead of our thoughts being a logical process determined through the sum of our experiences and environment, they'd be the product of an RNG feeding arbitrary inputs at random."

Ah, but the lowest-level physical workings of the brain may indeed be affected by the whims of random quantum events. As far as I know, we're still pretty far from understanding exactly how the low-level physics of the brain interacts with the all the high-level abstractions of consciousness. There could be some mix of true randomness and true deterministic processes going on. At the very least, there's also plenty of actions we take during the day that are result of decisions made below a conscious, rational level, which adds another nuance to the idea of choice (for my favorite humorous take on this, see The Trouble with Brains.)

I should make clear that I'm not decidedly on the side of determinism, but it is a problem that fascinates me, and Flashforward brought it back to mind (as it was fated to do. ;) ). Like xenhpi and Andrew, my day-to-day frame of reference includes a assumption of free will.

Well, but is it really a choice if it always happens? The deterministic argument is that your every "choice", whether they be typical (no anchovies) or very rare (anchovies), is a product of mechanistic physical processes, pre-determined by conditions and events preceding the action. That the brain, despite its immense complexity, abstraction layers, ability to reference and effect itself, is still a physical object and therefore subject to deterministic physical laws. That the "choice" *feels* like a free action, but that that feeling is an illusion.

That kind of argument is implied in Lloyd's pushing of the Minkowski block theory in the book, (view spoiler)[until that stance is blown away by Theo's brother committing suicide (thus proving the visions were not of an inevitable future). (hide spoiler)]

I just remembered that Slaughterhouse-Five is a perfect example of a sci-fi work dealing with determinism / a Minkowski block of time. That book's Tralfamadorian aliens see all of time at once - one vast, inevitable panorama, and have their fatalistic "so it goes" philosophy that goes along with their perception.

That picture was taken by Roger Chang - you can see more of his Dragon*Con pics on his Flickr stream - including about 5 million parade shots, and Veronica being attacked by a brain slug.

I remember in college being very disturbed when I first came across the question of how free will could exist in our apparently deterministic physical universe. For a short while I thought chaos theory provided a way out, until I realized that chaotic systems, though unpredictable in the long-term, are still entirely deterministic (I was in humanities instead of sciences, or I would have realized that sooner.) Maybe the bizarre wonderland of quantum physics *could* offer some back door to free will, especially since there still seems to be a variety of interpretations (ie, no consensus) of how micro quantum physics relates to our macro-level day-to-day Newtonian-Einstein physics world?

Flashforward addresses this issue head-on, making its main characters face the question of destiny (determinism) vs. choice (free will) in how they respond to their flashforward visions. This had great potential, but fell a bit flat for me -- wasn't really engaged with any of the characters so their struggles had much impact than they could have. Nonetheless, it obviously got me thinking about the problem.

I know there must be other science fiction works that address this issue - heck, practically any time-travel story raises the issue implicitly -- but I don't know if I've ever read or seen a really excellent example.

What did you think of Flashforward's take on this?

And any suggestions of other sci-fi works that tackled it?

I too enjoyed how Sawyer made the human impact of the flashforward 'visions' one of the book's central themes. Unfortunately, it didn't quite live up the potential of the premise for me. The clunkiness of some of the writing and the fact that I found the characters not that engaging lessened the poignancy of their struggles with destiny, choice, spirituality, etc. Still, the book was intriguing and I'm glad I read it.

Trike wrote: "Neal Stephenson is terrible at infodumps in that his entire books are infodumps. That's why I like The Diamond Age best of his novels - the information is presented much less obtrusively. Douglas Adams did a lot of infodumps, too, but his were like Stephenson's in that it's infodump raised to the power of art. It's why you buy the book.."

For some reason Stephenson's infodumps work much better for me than Sawyer's in Flashforward. Part of it may be that the information in Stephenson's books is generally more inherently interesting to me, but more of it may be that Stephenson's style makes the information just a tad more engaging (which can make all the difference when digesting an infodump).

When I re-read Dune, which I still love, the infodumps are more obvious and a bit painful, especially when it's compounded by the obvious exposition of one character telling another things they'd clearly already know.

Ed wrote: "Jlawrence wrote: "Ed, I meant to look for you at the Richard Garriott talk on Fri but forgot. Did you catch it? I had tons of fun at the con, too."

Yep, I was there! I was initially a little disappointed it wasn't a panel about Ultima, but what he ended up talking about was pretty fascinating stuff."

I agree. Before the talk, my general take on his space travel had been "Ok, he's super-rich so he can afford to buy a ride to the space station - not that interesting", but I was very impressed with how much detailed research and thought he's put into how commercial space travel can become less and less expensive, and how that can revive space exploration in general, and how he performed his own protein crystal growth experiments while in space, etc.

Andrew wrote: "Oh well next time. Rather a missed opportunity with you all there. All those fun awkward intros where you meet another online personality :)..."
I revel in the awkward of meeting people I have known first online, seriously it can be great."

Agreed - next year we should just make it happen if T & V don't have a chance to pick an official time/place.

BTW, here's aldenoneil (left) and me (right) at the con.

Ed, I meant to look for you at the Richard Garriott talk on Fri but forgot. Did you catch it? I had tons of fun at the con, too.

The meet-up never materialized. T & V need an assistant to help them organize their S&L activities - any volunteers??