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General Battuta
Feb 7, 2011

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.
Proclarush Taonaos is such a cool name, I wonder who came up with it and whether you could sell weed named after it.

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General Battuta
Feb 7, 2011

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.
Lol hold on a second “the name of the place is the pronunciation of the gate address” makes no drat sense

Floppychop
Mar 30, 2012

Invalid Validation posted:

I can’t imagine why, Stargate must have been one of the most popular shows that poo poo channel had.

Because apparently they needed more air time for garbage professional wrestling.

Zesty
Jan 17, 2012

The Great Twist
SyFy cancelled the Expanse after 3 seasons. It is absolute trash.

Cojawfee
May 31, 2006
I think the US is dumb for not using Celsius
I assume you mean Syfy not the expanse.

pixaal
Jan 8, 2004

All ice cream is now for all beings, no matter how many legs.


syfy ends every good show. Every time I give them another chance because they have a few shows with 2-3 seasons they gut the entire lineup a year later and put on reruns new cheaper poo poo instead.

Dark Matter was fun and had strong sg-1 levels of camp.

Wicked Them Beats
Apr 1, 2007

Moralists don't really *have* beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child's toy left on the carpet. The toy must be put away immediately. And the child reprimanded.

Dark Matter ending on a cliffhanger was a real bummer.

pentyne
Nov 7, 2012

Wicked Them Beats posted:

Dark Matter ending on a cliffhanger was a real bummer.

GreenNight
Feb 19, 2006
Turning the light on the darkest places, you and I know we got to face this now. We got to face this now.

Same with Alphas. And SGU. And Deadly Class.

8one6
May 20, 2012

When in doubt, err on the side of Awesome!

Atlantis was canceled while still having ratings that a network exec would publicly murder someone to get for a show nowadays.

Light Gun Man
Oct 17, 2009

toEjaM iS oN
vaCatioN




Lipstick Apathy
I always heard they got good ratings but it wasn't the demographic they wanted. Like they were chasing young men views but got tons of older women ones instead (gee I wonder why). Somehow, this is bad to executives.

PittTheElder
Feb 13, 2012

:geno: Yes, it's like a lava lamp.

Cojawfee posted:

I assume you mean Syfy not the expanse.

The Expanse is honestly not great. Season 1 rules, but after that the show just keeps on insisting that time be given to James "I am profoundly boring" Holden

MiddleOne
Feb 17, 2011

Wicked Them Beats posted:

Dark Matter ending on a cliffhanger was a real bummer.

Dark Matter failed because it had two awful first seasons that didn't build an audience.

General Battuta
Feb 7, 2011

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

PittTheElder posted:

The Expanse is honestly not great. Season 1 rules, but after that the show just keeps on insisting that time be given to James "I am profoundly boring" Holden

I'm sure I've said this in other threads but The Expanse is like ordering a gourmet meal and getting the deconstructed version. It's got all the ingredients of a prestige TV show — high production values, big sprawling pre-plotted source material, unique VFX style, densely serialized story — but nobody seems to have bothered cooking them up with any kind of creative flair or higher aspiration. It's consistently okay but it never really reaches for those moments of more which make the very best TV shows. The things it has to say are very familiar "going to space won't change human nature" and "a person is good people are stupid" and "ideologically motivated violence becomes cyclical" kinda stuff.

The books are kind of the same way, they're a prolonged exercise in how to render a sweeping naturalistic space opera down into its most mundane and boring parts. There's a - this is the vaguest of spoilers - plot thread in book 8 about someone organizing a gigantic conspiracy while on the run, and it's just the most exhaustingly tedious thing to read, because the writers consciously focus on, like, the exhaustion of confinement and the sameness of the food.

It's almost like purposefully deflationary space opera. "No matter where you go and what you see you'll still be eating and making GBS threads and getting bad sleep" kind of space opera. I would definitely expect an Expanse character to say something like that after witnessing alien wonders from before the dawn of man or whatever. Then they would dump their half-eaten noodles in the recycler.

e: to make a comparison that will no doubt lead to some angry posts, BSG went absolutely off the rails, just completely bonkers 'we're going to listen to space bob dylan and meet god' wild. But even in its worst moments it was always trying something new with its music and cinematography and writing. It failed a lot, a lot, but it also hit some highs that few shows ever reach. The Expanse is...you can always feel the clunk and bump of the narrative gearbox when the writers shove in a b-plot for the episode, or take steps to add some character conflict, or do one of those other nice perfectly functional things involved in making consistently okay TV. It's fine. It's good. It's just not great.

e2: like, imagine The Expanse making an episode as individually perfect as SG-1's "Abyss". You can't, you can't do it! The show doesn't have the flexibility and passion to do something as narratively focused as "two characters are locked in a room while one of them is tortured to death over and over again", and actually get a perfect hour of TV out of it. The latest season of The Expanse had an episode with a character locked alone on a ship and they didn't give the actress a drat thing to do except scream and cry.

General Battuta fucked around with this message at 05:51 on Feb 19, 2021

Gelf
Oct 1, 2005

Wake up and smell the psychosis!\

Recently finished up at end of S8 on an SG1 rewatch, instead of S9 we have jumped over to Atlantis instead.

In episode 3 'Hide and Seek' Sheppard's one personal item is a tape of a football game, in episode 9 'Home' he's also somehow smuggled a paperback copy of war and peace:

Weir: War and Peace. Mmm some heavy reading.
Sheppard: Yeah. Well back on Earth when I was getting ready for this mission I realized there was a good chance I might be here for a while so I figured 'why not bring along a book that takes a while to read.'
Weir: Page 17.

I'd be pissed at his "one rule for thee, one rule for me" approach to the one personal item rule if I were on the expedition!

SlothfulCobra
Mar 27, 2011

I haven't mustered the will to watch the Expanse, but from what I've heard it seems laboriously tailored to appealing to science nerds about realism about space travel according to currently available technology.

Which is unfortunate because unless there's some kind of major technological or economic shift (and those do happen every so often in history) then space travel really sucks to be involved with because it's just being cooped up in small rooms for years while your body slowly dissolves, and if corporations get free reign in space and don't get pared back at all, they'll probably want to grind people up and throw them away on whatever space things happen in the future.

Just sounds really not fun or aspirational at all.

GreenNight
Feb 19, 2006
Turning the light on the darkest places, you and I know we got to face this now. We got to face this now.

Yeah but it’s not like that at all.

MiddleOne
Feb 17, 2011

Gelf posted:

I'd be pissed at his "one rule for thee, one rule for me" approach to the one personal item rule if I were on the expedition!

Kinda pointless to get upset about it when the grift has already passed though.

GreenNight posted:

Yeah but it’s not like that at all.

Yeah The Expanse has magic engines, tactical gravity and magic alien molecules. It's not really about realism at all.

Floppychop
Mar 30, 2012

MiddleOne posted:

.
Yeah The Expanse has magic engines, tactical gravity and magic alien molecules. It's not really about realism at all.

The magic engines are a thing, since they can can keep a constant acceleration as long as they're fueled. But that makes the gravity inertia based instead of magical artificial gravity.

And the protomolecule is no worse than ~nanobots~.

Is the Expanse perfect? No.
Is it entertaining, especially in a world with no new Stargate? Yes.

MiddleOne
Feb 17, 2011

My point is it's just a different style of non-realism.

pentyne
Nov 7, 2012

8one6 posted:

Atlantis was canceled while still having ratings that a network exec would publicly murder someone to get for a show nowadays.

Same with SGU.

It's ratings cratered hard in relation to it being shuffled in the schedule, but it was still doing like 5x the numbers that SyFy was getting 5 years later.

I looked into it back in 2015 and posted this

quote:

Season 1 peak at 3 million, hovered around 2.4 mill for a while, then dropped like a stone when SyFy started messing with its schedule, and ended up hovering at 1.8-20. million, an "unsustainable" level. New 2013 SyFy show Dominion on the other had was declared a resounding success when it premiered to 2 million viewers, and had a season average of 1.6 million. Same thing with Z Nation (average 1.4), only it's notable that it started gaining back viewers for the last 5 episodes.

Cable ratings dropped off a loving cliff almost right after SGU got cancelled.

pentyne fucked around with this message at 06:46 on Feb 19, 2021

Mu Zeta
Oct 17, 2002

Me crush ass to dust

SlothfulCobra posted:

I haven't mustered the will to watch the Expanse, but from what I've heard it seems laboriously tailored to appealing to science nerds about realism about space travel according to currently available technology.

Which is unfortunate because unless there's some kind of major technological or economic shift (and those do happen every so often in history) then space travel really sucks to be involved with because it's just being cooped up in small rooms for years while your body slowly dissolves, and if corporations get free reign in space and don't get pared back at all, they'll probably want to grind people up and throw them away on whatever space things happen in the future.

Just sounds really not fun or aspirational at all.

The show does a good job portraying space travel as harsh and people will be abused because capitalism but overall it's still a hopeful show. That said, man my love for the show fell pretty hard in seasons 4 and 5 because the story ground to a halt. I'll still happily re-watch the first 3 though. It's a fun rollercoaster ride.

Mu Zeta fucked around with this message at 07:17 on Feb 19, 2021

PittTheElder
Feb 13, 2012

:geno: Yes, it's like a lava lamp.

SlothfulCobra posted:

I haven't mustered the will to watch the Expanse, but from what I've heard it seems laboriously tailored to appealing to science nerds about realism about space travel according to currently available technology.

I mean I am one of those nerds, and the more I watch it the less I like it.

Farmer Crack-Ass
Jan 2, 2001

this is me posting irl

Floppychop posted:

Because apparently they needed more air time for garbage professional wrestling.

That might have been during the stretch of time where the exec in charge of SYFY was known to literally dislike sci-fi.

Nullsmack
Dec 7, 2001
Digital apocalypse

Farmer Crack-rear end posted:

That might have been during the stretch of time where the exec in charge of SYFY was known to literally dislike sci-fi.

How does that even happen? Whose bright idea was it to put someone that doesn't like sci-fi in charge of the channel that's brand is literally sci-fi?

Mu Zeta
Oct 17, 2002

Me crush ass to dust

All that matters are ratings. Ghost hunting and wrestling ratings were way better than scifi shows and I'm guessing running syfy is just a stepping stone to the next job.

Brawnfire
Jul 13, 2004

🎧Listen to Cylindricule!🎵
https://linktr.ee/Cylindricule

First things first, all the books gotta go. Always hated em. The real thing that's gonna bring people into this library is tug jobs.

Farmer Crack-Ass
Jan 2, 2001

this is me posting irl

Nullsmack posted:

How does that even happen? Whose bright idea was it to put someone that doesn't like sci-fi in charge of the channel that's brand is literally sci-fi?

Channel branding kind of fell apart. The History Channel ran a reality TV show called Ice Road Truckers for over a decade.

pile of brown
Dec 31, 2004
It was a living history of ice road truckers

Norwegian Rudo
May 9, 2013

Light Gun Man posted:

I always heard they got good ratings but it wasn't the demographic they wanted. Like they were chasing young men views but got tons of older women ones instead (gee I wonder why). Somehow, this is bad to executives.

It's not exactly difficult to understand. Advertisers want to reach young demographics (because they're more willing to try new things) and pay more to advertise on programming that reaches said demographic.

As to the wrestling hate; is it silly to have wrestling on a sci-fi channel? Yes of course, but it aired on a night Syfy didn't otherwise program, and it was paid for by NBCU, not out of Syfy's budget. Wrestling was not to blame for anybody's favourite show getting cancelled, no matter how much they might like to believe it.

Light Gun Man
Oct 17, 2009

toEjaM iS oN
vaCatioN




Lipstick Apathy

Norwegian Rudo posted:

It's not exactly difficult to understand. Advertisers want to reach young demographics (because they're more willing to try new things) and pay more to advertise on programming that reaches said demographic.

Older people got money too :shrug:

Winifred Madgers
Feb 12, 2002

Yeah but young people are dumb and impressionable, whereas old people are set in their ways and more difficult to persuade. Even when you can get a stubborn 65 year old to buy your product, you have a customer for a few years, but when you imprint brand loyalty on a 25 year old skull full of mush, you have a customer for many decades. The ROI is much higher in both respects.

Doggles
Apr 22, 2007

From the Simpsons meme thread.

alexandriao posted:







Unfortunately the low quality source frame meant two of them didn't work

Koirhor
Jan 14, 2008

by Fluffdaddy
What no one wants to mention that terrible web series from a few years ago? Lmao

8one6
May 20, 2012

When in doubt, err on the side of Awesome!

Koirhor posted:

What no one wants to mention that terrible web series from a few years ago? Lmao

You mean Stargate: Origins, the episodic narrative about how someone had a bunch of adventurers in front of a green screen through the stargate but kept it a secret for, um, well I never actually watched it because gently caress paying $10/month for a badly made Stargate youtube show, but I'm sure there was a good reason.

happyhippy
Feb 21, 2005

Playing games, watching movies, owning goons. 'sup
Pillbug

Doggles posted:

From the Simpsons meme thread.

Then after 37 minutes, it cuts him in two.

And its not canon! The whole object has to enter the gate before it is sent, as seen with that episode in Atlantis where the ship gets stuck.

/nerd

Suspicious
Apr 30, 2005
You know he's the villain, because he's got shifty eyes.
The gate/vortex behaves as the plot requires.

happyhippy
Feb 21, 2005

Playing games, watching movies, owning goons. 'sup
Pillbug
A wraith did it.

pixaal
Jan 8, 2004

All ice cream is now for all beings, no matter how many legs.


But what about sticking your arm in to keep the wormhole open so they can't dial out?

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alexandriao
Jul 20, 2019


pixaal posted:

But what about sticking your arm in to keep the wormhole open so they can't dial out?

man with the giant hand has a friend: man with the long arm, from keeping it in the stargate

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