@rakontisto@mastodon.social avatar

rakontisto

@rakontisto@mastodon.social

Generalist, writer, raconteur electronique, musician, mosaicist, ursine scootician. I work for a university, tell stories in my spare time, make music with electricity, teach mosaic arts at nonprofits, and really enjoy a careworn wooden spoon, a well-kept French automobile, or an evening with Johnny Dollar. I go by #sonascope on #metafilter, #kantoendrato for solo music gigs, #kevsab in duo mode, and tell stories as either Joe Belknap Wall or Joe B Wall.

In the real world, I'm just Joe.

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sjvn, to random
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GPU fans just keep getting larger and larger.

rakontisto,
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@sjvn I refuse to put a fan on my Raspberry Pi for precisely this reason. It's a slippery slope!

rakontisto, to SF
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I contend that if Space:1999 had writing on a par with its art direction, costuming, and casting, it would still be a going concern while Star Trek would be a quaintly amusing curiosity of its time like Lost In Space. Oy vey, that writing, though, especially that second season.

rakontisto,
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@nyrath Such an apt quip. Looks like the future, reads like a story written for a 5th grade class.

rakontisto,
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@JoshuaACNewman @nyrath Main Mission looked a lot like NASA's control rooms, but I'll further defend that by pointing out that the main control rooms on Trek and SW are always, for some insane reason, on the outermost layer of their ships and just waiting to be shot at. I like that they were looking at a screen and not a window, which feels more modern.

rakontisto,
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@JoshuaACNewman @nyrath Yeah, it sucked when they went from the immense set from the first season to a much dinkier and submarinier set. I mean, to be fair, Maya's giant sideburns did arouse my adolescent interest in people with giant sideburns, but Frieberger's weird budget things and the need for rah-rah space army shenanigans (one of the things I always disliked about Trek) really sucked the Valium elegance out of the setup.

rakontisto,
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@JoshuaACNewman @DenOfEarth @nyrath That reminds me of one of my major irritations with more modern sci-fi, where the question is "Should we use slaves (robots, computers, genetically modified beings) to do our work for us?" because it seems to me that the answer should be a fairly obvious "well, no," instead of all that Westworld.

rakontisto,
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@DenOfEarth @JoshuaACNewman @nyrath I feel like somewhere down the line, a lot of sci-fi writers stopped caring about crafting a good narrative and instead just decided that their main job was to make a very important point, so good stories that carried an important message lost ground to sledgehammers cloaked in cliché.

rakontisto,
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@JoshuaACNewman @DenOfEarth @nyrath Bradbury, though, had a feel for language and basic human emotions, which is why (to me, at least), The Martian Chronicles holds up so well as a literary work as well as making some grim (and also optimistic) points about humanity. Clarke did great big picture stuff when he was at his best, though.

rakontisto,
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@nyrath @mattmcirvin @DenOfEarth @JoshuaACNewman @FredKiesche The City and The Stars is my all-time favorite Clarke, oddly enough. It's just so much story in so few pages.

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