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Hurrah I have successfully not-defaulted on Invisible Ficathon!
...whether I have successfully anything else related to invisible ficathon remains an open question.
But now that I'm not actively avoiding that, I guess I can post a proper update there, maybe!
Fannishly: On Sunday I watched the new Cosmos. I found it sadly disappointing. It wasn't bad, nothing with Neil deGrasse Tyson is ever bad, it just wasn't much of anything else, either.
It was about 50% Tyson narrating an extremely generic planetarium show while gesturing vaguely at an empty soundstage, about 40% an incredibly cheaply animated story about how a dead white guy was the first person to discover the universe because of his faith in God, and about 10% Tyson doing what Tyson does best, which is make people want to cry about how wonderful science is. If only the whole show had been like the last five minutes. As it is, those last five minutes are probably the only reason I'm going to try to stick around for next week's episode.
As for the animated segment, I'm imagining that it went something like this: they put together their best cut of the episode, and then they did a screening for the execs at Fox, and the execs at Fox were like "It was okay, but how did you not notice that it's just an hour of a person of color talking about science. You need more dead white European Christian men talking about how awesome the Christian God is. Make those changes and get back to us." And the production team left the meeting, looked at each other, said "Jesus suppurating Christ. Okay we'll put the least possible effort into it and they'll have to make us take it out again." So they did that, and they showed it to the execs, and they were like "Excellent!" and greenlit it.
I don't know that's what happened, but I hope it is, because the other possibilities are even worse. Giordano Bruno's story isn't a bad story, and if you want to try to draw in people who think that modern cosmology is incompatible with their faith, it's actually a pretty good idea of a story to start with! It was just incredibly poorly done - I've seen dollar-store "bible story" videos with better animation - and didn't seem to fit in very well with the episode as a whole.
The rest of it was desperately bland. If their intended audience was "people who have never been to a science museum, ever" maybe it was okay, and kudos for trying to reach out to those people. But even then, it was just so generic, and by that I mean not just that the astronomy was basic, but that there was nothing concrete at all - neither the narration or the computer animation really gave us anything to grab on to. Even if I compare it to a basic "this is space" exhibit at a museum, they would have photos of real places, demonstrations using actual physical objects, stories about how discoveries happened, and so on. The original Cosmos, even, might have had scenes that were just Sagan sitting in a chair holding an apple, but it was a real chair and a real apple and they were directly relevant to what he was talking about. This had Tyson walking over a blobby green computer-generated texture while talking about dinosaurs while I was like, "Is that supposed to be tree canopy or something? Why is he walking on top of a weirdly flat tree canopy? What is going on? Why is this better than him walking through an actual place?"
I think part of the problem is that they were depending on the beauty of the space visuals to carry it, but I'm in the generation that grew up on pictures from space. I mean, I had a t-shirt with the Blue Marble printed on it, there are tutorials on tumblr for making your own "galactic" leggings, if I want pretty space pictures I can just go to APOD or NASA galleries online and see back to the beginning of the universe. Computer-generated galaxies ain't going to cut it. And the genericness of the images they used ended up making it seem less wondrous than Sagan's apple, not more. There's a reason Tyson sitting on a shoreline holding an old book has turned up on my Tumblr feed a dozen times in the last two days, and none of the computer-animated effects have at all.
I was thinking about this during the commercial beak after the bit about galaxies, and how when I was a kid I found pictures of galaxies pretty but not particularly amazing, until I read the part in "The Wounded Sky" where they see the galaxy from outside for the very first time in all of human history. All the simulated pictures in the world couldn't give me an emotional sense of the mindboggling size of it, but realizing that no matter how advanced our technology is, we will probably never be able to see the whole thing - that made me catch my breath.
Imagine if, instead of swoopy computer simulations of white glowy dots with an circle around the sag arm to show where Earth is without conveying any sense of scale, they had instead panned over a super-high-resolution ifaux-3D Hubble image of a distance galactic group, and had Tyson say, "This isn't an image of our galaxy and our neighbors. We will probably never be able to see an actual photograph of what our own home galaxy looks like - we would have to travel a million light-years away from home, and even if we could travel faster than light - fast enough to get from here to the nearest star in only a day - it would take thousands and thousands of years to travel outside our galaxy. Until then, this image is the best we can do - [talk about actual photo]. We can see things that happened billions of years ago, billions of light-years away, better than we will ever know what our own home galaxy looks like."
To make it wonderful, you have to make it about something real.
Also, I tried to watch it on FOX, out of a vague sense of gratitude that they were daring to broadcast it, but the aspect ratio was wrong, and I don't watch Actual TV often enough to know how to fix it, so I ended up switching to Nat Geo, which at least had it letterboxed. Look, I *expect* aspect ratio issues when I'm pirating TV online, but if there's going to be just as much hassle when I attempt to watch broadcast, I'm not even sure there's a point in trying.
Also, commercials every ten minutes are pretty much antithetical to establishing and maintaining a sense of wonder, just saying.
But the last five minutes were amazing!
...whether I have successfully anything else related to invisible ficathon remains an open question.
But now that I'm not actively avoiding that, I guess I can post a proper update there, maybe!
Fannishly: On Sunday I watched the new Cosmos. I found it sadly disappointing. It wasn't bad, nothing with Neil deGrasse Tyson is ever bad, it just wasn't much of anything else, either.
It was about 50% Tyson narrating an extremely generic planetarium show while gesturing vaguely at an empty soundstage, about 40% an incredibly cheaply animated story about how a dead white guy was the first person to discover the universe because of his faith in God, and about 10% Tyson doing what Tyson does best, which is make people want to cry about how wonderful science is. If only the whole show had been like the last five minutes. As it is, those last five minutes are probably the only reason I'm going to try to stick around for next week's episode.
As for the animated segment, I'm imagining that it went something like this: they put together their best cut of the episode, and then they did a screening for the execs at Fox, and the execs at Fox were like "It was okay, but how did you not notice that it's just an hour of a person of color talking about science. You need more dead white European Christian men talking about how awesome the Christian God is. Make those changes and get back to us." And the production team left the meeting, looked at each other, said "Jesus suppurating Christ. Okay we'll put the least possible effort into it and they'll have to make us take it out again." So they did that, and they showed it to the execs, and they were like "Excellent!" and greenlit it.
I don't know that's what happened, but I hope it is, because the other possibilities are even worse. Giordano Bruno's story isn't a bad story, and if you want to try to draw in people who think that modern cosmology is incompatible with their faith, it's actually a pretty good idea of a story to start with! It was just incredibly poorly done - I've seen dollar-store "bible story" videos with better animation - and didn't seem to fit in very well with the episode as a whole.
The rest of it was desperately bland. If their intended audience was "people who have never been to a science museum, ever" maybe it was okay, and kudos for trying to reach out to those people. But even then, it was just so generic, and by that I mean not just that the astronomy was basic, but that there was nothing concrete at all - neither the narration or the computer animation really gave us anything to grab on to. Even if I compare it to a basic "this is space" exhibit at a museum, they would have photos of real places, demonstrations using actual physical objects, stories about how discoveries happened, and so on. The original Cosmos, even, might have had scenes that were just Sagan sitting in a chair holding an apple, but it was a real chair and a real apple and they were directly relevant to what he was talking about. This had Tyson walking over a blobby green computer-generated texture while talking about dinosaurs while I was like, "Is that supposed to be tree canopy or something? Why is he walking on top of a weirdly flat tree canopy? What is going on? Why is this better than him walking through an actual place?"
I think part of the problem is that they were depending on the beauty of the space visuals to carry it, but I'm in the generation that grew up on pictures from space. I mean, I had a t-shirt with the Blue Marble printed on it, there are tutorials on tumblr for making your own "galactic" leggings, if I want pretty space pictures I can just go to APOD or NASA galleries online and see back to the beginning of the universe. Computer-generated galaxies ain't going to cut it. And the genericness of the images they used ended up making it seem less wondrous than Sagan's apple, not more. There's a reason Tyson sitting on a shoreline holding an old book has turned up on my Tumblr feed a dozen times in the last two days, and none of the computer-animated effects have at all.
I was thinking about this during the commercial beak after the bit about galaxies, and how when I was a kid I found pictures of galaxies pretty but not particularly amazing, until I read the part in "The Wounded Sky" where they see the galaxy from outside for the very first time in all of human history. All the simulated pictures in the world couldn't give me an emotional sense of the mindboggling size of it, but realizing that no matter how advanced our technology is, we will probably never be able to see the whole thing - that made me catch my breath.
Imagine if, instead of swoopy computer simulations of white glowy dots with an circle around the sag arm to show where Earth is without conveying any sense of scale, they had instead panned over a super-high-resolution ifaux-3D Hubble image of a distance galactic group, and had Tyson say, "This isn't an image of our galaxy and our neighbors. We will probably never be able to see an actual photograph of what our own home galaxy looks like - we would have to travel a million light-years away from home, and even if we could travel faster than light - fast enough to get from here to the nearest star in only a day - it would take thousands and thousands of years to travel outside our galaxy. Until then, this image is the best we can do - [talk about actual photo]. We can see things that happened billions of years ago, billions of light-years away, better than we will ever know what our own home galaxy looks like."
To make it wonderful, you have to make it about something real.
Also, I tried to watch it on FOX, out of a vague sense of gratitude that they were daring to broadcast it, but the aspect ratio was wrong, and I don't watch Actual TV often enough to know how to fix it, so I ended up switching to Nat Geo, which at least had it letterboxed. Look, I *expect* aspect ratio issues when I'm pirating TV online, but if there's going to be just as much hassle when I attempt to watch broadcast, I'm not even sure there's a point in trying.
Also, commercials every ten minutes are pretty much antithetical to establishing and maintaining a sense of wonder, just saying.
But the last five minutes were amazing!
no subject
I have a feeling there will be animated interludes in every episode, in the same style, so .. brace yourself. But I thought choosing to tell the Bruno story made a lot of sense -- in io9's review, they compare Tyson's choice of Bruno with Sagan's choice to open with Eratosthenes and Alexandria, and I think they got it spot on:
"Sagan, worried about the nuclear arms race and the potential for humanity to destroy ourselves, warned us of the fragility of knowledge and what we can all lose if we're too careless with fire. Tyson, on the other hand, warns us of the danger of living in a world where questioning official stories becomes heresy, where curiosity becomes thought crime and where exploration of the universe becomes a trespass into the dominion of authority."
So yes, it's about reconciling religion with science, but it's also about censorship and silencing and power and fear; both of those are topical and Bruno makes the point well.
I'm not sure "real images" would work better than computer graphics. I mean. "Real photos of space" basically are computer graphics anyway. Your point about seeing the MW from outside is valid, but I don't think they could avoid doing that given the "Ship of the Imagination" conceit.
My major critiques were the Eurocentrism and the implicit presentation of modern humanity as the apex of the universe .. both expected, both annoying, I'll get over it. I think the cosmic calendar can be an effective metaphor, but seriously? Seriously? The entire history of the universe has been leading up to us? Is that really the message you intend to be sending?
anyway w/e I thought it was awesome, and even though it's not perfect we really need another hugely popular science show led by someone who's good at both science AND communication, so I say it's a win.
no subject
Anyway I agree with your critiques, too. ^_^ I don't disagree about the Bruno story - I honestly don't know how I feel about the decision to include that particular story, but I still feel like it was poorly executed regardless.
I liked the second episode a lot more, though! Maybe it was just lower expectations, and maybe it's that when you're talking about life on earth it's easier to bring it down to concrete specifics, but I didn't have any major whines. The cheap 2d animation was a lot less annoying when it was just a couple minutes of bears instead of fifteen minutes of Drama! with Monks! and I felt like I basically knew where Tyson was supposed to be standing and why most of the time, not like he was standing on an empty soundstage with weird computer wallpaper. And I liked that they managed to address some of the most common stupid "arguments" against evolution without granting them any validity at all by giving the impression they were just discussing obsolete ideas that nobody had taken seriously for a hundred years. That was great.
no subject
How did you feel about the CGI greenscreen they used to fake the primordial earth for the last 5 minutes??
.... just kidding, that was Iceland in an uncredited supporting role. :-P :-P That's my annoyance for Ep. 2. Just tell us there's a place on Earth now that might be like the place where life started! That's pretty cool!